They say that no visit to Atlantic Canada is complete without a traditional feed of lobster.
Few grow up here without having at least some experience with handling the delicious, if prickly, crustaceans. The species and the harvesting thereof, is part of the fabric of life in the region.
But before they’re hauled up from the ocean floor for a date with a diner plate, Atlantic lobsters have to survive almost unfathomable odds in order to reach adulthood.
It is in the measuring of those odds and the conclusions that can be drawn from them that scientists like Remy Rochette have recently turned their attention.
Rochette is a marine evolutionary ecologist with the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, New Brunswick and has been studying lobsters for several years.
He recently made a presentation during the U.S./Canada Lobster Symposium, which was held in Charlottetown in November. He presented some interesting predictions regarding the species and its future in Atlantic Canadian waters.
The symposium focused on the Atlantic lobster in a changing ecosystem. Rochette used some previous research he was involved in to run a computer simulation cross-referencing projections for lobster larvae dispersion in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with current ocean warming trends.
Rochette was trying to predict how larval dispersal might change when faced with a change in average water temperature. Ocean surface temperatures are expected to increase by about two per cent over the next several decades.
The model resulted in more larval lobsters surviving to reach the ocean floor.
“Overall, our findings were for increased settlement in I think it was 15-year projections, compared to contemporary projections,” said Rochette.
As water temperatures rise, Atlantic lobster have been shown to develop faster at their larval stage, which means they’ll spend less time floating around in the currents near the ocean surface and won’t be carried as far away from where they released from their mother.
“So you lose fewer larvae to the offshore waters,” said Rochette.
Ryan Stanley, a DFO scientist in Halifax, studied larval lobster during his education and is the grandson of a Tignish, Prince Edward Island, fisherman.
He hasn’t worked directly with Rochette’s group, but their research has overlapped in some areas, specifically regarding the impact of temperature on the behavior of lobster eggs and larvae.
“If you imagine a mom who has 100,000 babies, very few of those will survive. So little changes in their behaviour, be that a response to climate change or whether or not it is how they behave in response to different environmental conditions, can make a big change in how many of them actually make it and where they end up.”
At face value, Rochette’s prediction would seem to bode well for the lobster industry. The more lobsters that make it past the larval stage and sink to the ocean floor, the better their chances of living long enough to reach market size.
But Rochette cautioned against making any firm predictions based on the findings he presented at the symposium. They’re too preliminary he said and need to be backed up by more testing and research.
But the model, which takes two months to compute its findings, is promising, he said.
“It’s one tool in our toolkit. Because what matters ultimately for the fishery is recruitment of individuals to the fishery. So we try to predict that and understand how it changes over time… so that fishermen can adjust their harvesting strategies based on potential changes.”
Rochette started researching lobsters in earnest about six years ago when a call went out from the federal government, looking for researchers interested in commercial fisheries. The catch was that the research focus had to come from fishermen.
“The fishermen had to come up with questions that were of priority to them,” Rochette said.
His group brought together fishermen from throughout Atlantic Canada, scientists from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and some academics into a working group on the region’s lobster fishery.
“Lobster fishermen were really interested in this question of connectivity. So they wanted to know when they adopted protective or conservation measures in their own area, was it them that benefited from those measures? Or was it perhaps fishermen who were down stream?”
Specifically, the fishermen wanted to know more about what the long-standing practice of throwing back egg-bearing females was doing for the overall population.
The project became part of the federal Canadian Fisheries Research Network and became known as the Lobster Node.
To gather data for the researchers, the Lobster Node recruited fishermen from all over Atlantic Canada.
It was a historic partnership, explained Rochette, and he and many of his colleagues are eager to see it continue. They’re currently working on funding sources to keep it going.
Anytime you can get fishermen, scientists and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans working together for a common goal, it’s worth keeping that option open, he said.
There isn’t always a great working relationship between those three groups of people, he added, but in the Lobster Node, they’ve worked together long enough that many of those wrinkles have been smoothed away. They now work really well together as a team.
“In pretty much all of these fisheries there has never really been this coordinated research activity involving both DFO, academia and fishermen. So people are really hoping that platform can maintain and persist,” he said.
